Odditorium Or Warlords Of Mars Review From NME (6 out of 10 stars)
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NME
by Mark Beaumont
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Dig your own hole:
The Dandy Warhols’ fifth album yields the odd pop
truffle but fails to hit paydirt.
'So if you're playing in a rock n' roll band/But still
you’re doing whatever the man says/well I can tell you
for the money/The simple life honey is good” - ‘All
The Money Or The Simple Life Honey’
And don’t think the Dandy Warhols couldn’t have all
the money. In 2001, after ‘Bohemian Like You’
Vodafoned the brilliant but sales-flagging Big Pop
album ‘Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia’ out of a
career nosedive and back into the charts, what would
the dosh-conscious rock scumbag do? Knock out a
poly-unsaturated, non-bio, friendly bacteria, 0%
finance, nothing-to-pay-until-January follow-up of
ergonomically designed advert rock and guffaw all the
way to the bank of Moby in their complimentary Nissan
Micra, right? But no. Instead of a The Warhols
recorded 2003’s obtuse kraut-electro head-scratcher
‘Welcome To The Monkeyhouse’ (leapt on by Sky One
anyway, like there’d never be another Dido album or
something) and plunged wholeheartedly back into the
underground. When the hordes descended on their 2003
tour slavering for louche pop hits they’d chuck
‘Bohemian...’ away in the first 10 minutes, then play
three-hour sets of lengthy space jams. And now, just
as they find themselves the unexpected worldwide
superstars of the real-life Spinal Tap rockumentary
Dig! (that’s real-life Liam?), do they cash in with a
tortured paranoia concept album called ‘Stalked By A
Nutjob?’ Nope, they’ve returned to their drone-rock
boho part roots: chilling in the basement with a
bucket bong, a gaggle of bisexual sisters, a bowl of
horse pills and a guitar, smoking ‘n’ strumming their
way into the 13th dimension and deciding it’d be,
like, sooo far out if they did, like, a 55-second
campfire singalong track called ‘Did You Make A Song
With Otis’ using only percussion instruments and,
like, snarling dogs instead of guitars...
Like ‘All The Money..’ says - a parpy pop stormer
arriving after two lengthy dronefests like a
tongue-in-cheek reprise of their mobile phone-flogging
past - it’ll forever be the simple life (honey) for
the Warhols. No compromises, no hassles, no dutifully
spreading their cheeks ass-cheeks every time The Man
growls; “Where’s the single?” Hey, how about opening
the record with some old newsreader dude recounting
how The Dandy Warhols invented rock’n’roll back in
1950. Cool trip, maaan! Yeah, you could chase it up
with a 10-minute space-jazz trumpet-drone called ‘Love
Is The New Feel Awful’ with evil death-ray noises and
Darth Vader croaks all over it! Hell yeah, that’ll
really fuck with their heads! And check this, sister -
let’s make half the songs at least twice the length
they need to be! Fuckin’ genuis! If, as they have with
their promo T-shirts, they made a Frankie Goes To
Hollywood-aping shirt to expound their cuktural
philosphy, it’d read Warhols Say... Everything Goes.
The simple life, however, isn’t always that tuneful.
Much like their 1995 debut album ‘Dandys Rule OK’,
roughly half of ‘Odditorium...’ - their fith - can be
recognised as Earth pop music while the rest is an
extended lesson in bold, noble but not always
enjoyable Sound Odyssesy - kind of like David Bowies’s
‘Low’ in a food mixer. On the vapid side: ‘Easy’ is a
seven-minute muted funk noodle that defiantly refuses
to have a point and features Courtney Taylor-Taylor
seemingly phoning in a bad Damon Albarn impression
from a service station lavatory, while the 12-minute
krautfuzz plod of ‘A Loan Tonight’ spends endless
duration trying so hard to be Bowie’s Berlin period
that you can practically hear it goose-stepping around
Victoria Station pretending to be gay. More
successfully, ‘The New Country’ drenches a
banjo-slapping hoedown in space guitars and reverb to
quite dizzying effect and ‘There Is Only This Time’ is
an intriguing laptop moodscape that imagines Gregorian
monks singing Spiritualized. But when an initially
delicious galaxy groover like ‘Love Is The New Feel
Awful’ gets dragged backwards through six solid
minutes of jazzy trumpet widdle and bongos, you find
yourself praying for The Man to storm the studio, kick
over the bong and arse-rape them mercilessly until
they write Him a hit. Like, wake up and smell the
lethargy, duuuuudes...
Because when The Dandy Warhols get the rock out -
about two thirds of the way in - there’s few bands
more fun to party with. To hear first single ‘Smoke
It’, with its ranting nutter-with-a-megaphone
witticisms - “People got more baggage than JFK/And I’m
talkin’ ‘bout the airport” - its sly references to
OutKast’s ‘Ms Jackson’ and its bursts of ecstatic
whoops and yelps is to have a slice of hash pizza
thrust in your hand and whisked away to the college
pool party at the end of the universe. It’s an
all-too-brief glimpse of the freewheeling Dandys
spirit that made ‘Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia’
such an exhilarating pop rush, but it’s not alone: the
frankly stupendous ‘Everyone Is Totally Insane’ is
Gary Numan gone space walking around ELO’s 80’s
mothership, both sinister and sumptous at once, while
‘Holding Me Up’ turns from a by-numbers retread of
‘Boys Better’ into an unholy yob reville. And then
there’s ‘Down Like Disco’, rattling along Collrge Rock
Freeway with the top down, a breezy harmony in its
hair and a gaggle of guitars making out in the back.
Such moments regulary stumble out of the
self-indulgent improvisational soup of ‘Odditorium...’
to remind us, they’re just going through a difficult
evolutionary phase right now.
There’s two ways for the devout Dandys fan to approach
‘Odditorium...’. 1) It’s their ‘Kid A’, a brave
blunder into anew creed of experimentation into which
they will hopefully one day re-work The Tunes. Or 2)
what they really wanted to make was a week-long jazz
opus played entirely on dying cats, but the record
company made them put some proper songs on it. We
trust its the former - they’ve too much pop in their
souls to go too Eno - but either way ‘Odditorium...’,
like a particularly cuddly blue whale, is a tricky
beast to love. The simple life it may be; easy going
it ain’t.
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